In Search of the Russian Soul

Trying to discern the importance of individual U.S. far-right activists’ or movements’ connection to U.S.-Russia relations can feel as opaque as reading the Kremlin’s tea leaves.^[10] A more useful assessment of the history of joint Russian and American far-right activism ought to focus on person-to-person, or movement-to-movement, interactions as transnational relationships on their own terms. Untethered from the dark magic of Kremlinology, we can understand what the American Far Right sees in Russia: a mirror.

Holocaust Deniers

In the midst of Cold War agitation, Yockey’s beliefs began to take some hold, thanks to Willis A. Carto, a prominent U.S. Holocaust denier and White nationalist who admired Yockey for his criticism of American empire. Carto embraced Imperium and came to consider himself a devotee, promising to never “desert him.”^[11] Carto, the future head of the racist and antisemitic Liberty Lobby, kept his promise. Liberty Lobby kept Imperium in circulation, and Yockey’s writings were often published in the group’s weekly newsletter, The Spotlight, even after the author’s death in 1960. But more importantly, it was Carto who, in the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet Union, seized upon Yockey’s proclamations about who real Russians were.

By the time the great “evil empire”^[12] collapsed in on itself in the late 1980s, Russian ethno-nationalists and right-wing chauvinists had come to represent a sizable bloc in the new Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), supporting a number of ultra-nationalist institutions and intellectuals. Publications, notably Igor Shafarevich’s 1982 samizdat^[13] text Rusofobia (Russophobia), helped inspire a new generation of antisemitic, ultra-nationalist literature, and further solidified a victim-like mentality among nationalist dissidents in the RSFSR.^[14] Dissident culture made the rapid proliferation of these ideas possible. Robert Horvath, a historian who has written on nationalism in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, has argued that the free-wheeling nature of samizdat publication and distribution were effective in terms of spreading radical right-wing ideas. Its “pluralism,” he wrote, while often encouraging fruitful discussions, also “engendered a plethora of authoritarian, imperialist, anti-Semitic, and quasi-fascist currents,” and left ample room for reactionary ideas to evolve.^[15] Much like now-infamous forums such as 4Chan, or the more extreme 8Chan, there was plenty of room for proponents of extremist views to push their noxious ideas into the mainstream. As both samizdat and today’s digital platforms have made clear, there are some benefits to a world without gatekeepers, but also numerous drawbacks.

Among those who benefited from the growing openness of perestroika (rebuilding) and glasnost (openness) was the antisemitic organization Pamyat (“Memory”). Founded in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, Pamyat’s spokesman Dmitry Vasilyev, a former Soviet journalist, played a crucial role in bringing violent antisemitism into the streets.^[16] In the 1990s, the group republished the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious, fabricated 1903 document that purported to outline a plan for Jewish world domination. Like Yockey, Vasilyev and Pamyat saw ethnic Russians and their homeland as having been “tortured and plundered by aggressive Zionism, Talmudic atheism, and cosmopolitan usury”—all of which took place with the explicit cooperation of the Soviets.^[17] Although some of Pamyat’s claims bordered on comical—they blamed Jewish influence, for instance, for “food shortages, sex on television … [and] the nuclear accident at Chernobyl,” as well as the absurd allegation that Jews were encouraging alcoholism by putting liquor into kefir—the group effectively captured international attention while leaving questions of their actual power and influence unanswered.^[18]

In North America and the United Kingdom, Holocaust “revisionists”—the preferred euphemistic term of most international Holocaust deniers—were facing legal struggles, often for spreading neonazi propaganda. The RSFSR’s renewed antisemitism encouraged them. Just a year after the Soviet state imploded, Ernst Zündel, a German-born Holocaust denier based in Toronto and author of conspiratorial books like UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons?, dispatched one of his underlings to Moscow to meet with a few seemingly sympathetic Russian officials. Among them was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the ironically-named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, who had just began advocating for a pan-European union of far-right parties.^[19] Zündel would later travel to Russia on his own. Others, such as Swiss author Jürgen Graf and Italian writer Carlo Mattogno, followed Zündel’s lead in 1995, taking two “research trips” to dive into the recently-opened Moscow archives, which contained numerous World War II-related documents, but also to build up additional contacts.^[20]

While these three floated under the international media’s radar, not all of their like-minded colleagues were as lucky. David Irving, a self-appointed Holocaust scholar who became a central figure in denialist circles, managed to create an international incident during his 1992 trip to Moscow. Irving, like many legitimate historians, had been drawn to the newly independent Russia by the allure of long-inaccessible Soviet archives, much of which included a wealth of previously unseen World War II material. Under the auspices of publishing a biography of Joseph Goebbels, Irving became the first Western researcher to gain access to the war diaries of the Nazi’s former minister of propaganda, spanning from 1941 to 1945.^[21] When both Irving’s penchant for referring to himself as a “mild fascist”^[22] and his abuse of archival privileges nearly resulted in a permanent ban from all 2,000 archives within the former Soviet Union, the international right-wing media became apoplectic. Much like the contemporary White nationalist movement’s obsession with protecting their right to hate under the auspices of free speech, the global Far Right was outraged by this apparent violation of the antisemite’s “free speech” rights.^[23] The Russians, for their part, claimed they were duped into believing Irving was a legitimate historian.

But overall, the 1990s—close to two decades before Holocaust denial became illegal in Russia—proved to be a fruitful time for Western deniers who ventured there. Denialist organizations such as the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) praised the speed at which translations of Western “revisionist” materials were sold in the country. Among them were Graf’s Myth of the Holocaust, and Six Million “Lost” and Found, written by British National Front author Richard Harwood, the pen name of Richard Verrall. Graf’s text, which was excerpted in a special edition of Русский Вестник (Russkiy Vestnik) and published in full in a special 123-page booklet, was said to have sold over 200,000 copies in its first year on the market alone.^[24] Zündel attributed these successes to an effort to change Russia’s collective memory. “In the wake of the collapse of Communism,” he told an audience at IHR’s 1994 conference, “…people are enduring a drastic, soul-searching re-evaluation of their national history and collective self-identity.”^[25] While human rights groups like Memorial sought to correct the Communist Party’s whitewashed version of history, Holocaust deniers used this necessary revisiting of the country’s past as a cover for hate.^[26] Zündel’s wistful dreams “of future close collaboration between a revived, nationalist Russia and a revived, nationalist Germany”—a sentiment echoed by Pamyat—became, in a way, a reality.^[27] The “revisionist” project did manage to foster transnational relationships, but did so in part by making its stated goals more explicitly racist and White nationalist in the process.

By the time Carto—who was forced out of the IHR over an internal dispute with a colleague^[28]—brought his own revisionist conference to Russia in 2002, this process was well underway. The meeting was a joint operation of Carto’s latest venture, The Barnes Review, which merged more explicit White nationalist and White supremacist rhetoric with IHR-style revisionist historiography, and the Moscow-based Encyclopedia of Russia Civilization.^[29] Billed as the “First International Conference on Global Problems of World History,” coverage of the meeting presented Russia as a haven for “dissident” views.^[30] (“Revisionists Enjoy Free Speech Without Fear of Thought Police,” pronounced one headline.^[31]) Although Carto’s efforts in the country appear to be minimal after this period, one conference speaker would pick up the torch and carry it forward: former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard and perennial candidate David Duke.

Putin: Savior of the White Race?

In David Duke’s 2013 book, The Secret Behind Communism, the former Klansman writes of meeting the famous—or infamous—Russian dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn soon after the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s book on Russian Jews, Two Hundred Years Together, which argues that Jews were complicit, at the very least, in Communist atrocities. “I waited for ten years in vain for the book to be published in English,” writes Duke. “It remains unpublished to this day. Of course. The secret behind Communism must remain a secret to most of the public.”^[32] Duke was referring to a talking point that had made its way through White nationalist and antisemitic circles for years: That while we are told to “never forget” the Holocaust (in Duke’s terms, “the Jewish Holocaust”), we never acknowledge the even bigger genocide carried out by the Bolsheviks. And that, Duke argued, is because the “Jewish tribalists” in power make such discussion impossible.^[33]

Duke’s meeting with Solzhenitsyn in 2002 was far from his first experience in the country. His escapades began in September 1995, when he traveled to Russia and met with the Liberal Democratic Party’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whom Duke referred to as “protective of …the white race.”^[34] (Duke, somehow, either ignored or didn’t know that Zhirinovsky himself is of Jewish ancestry.) Four years later, he returned.^[35] In 1998, one of Duke’s associates, General Albert Makashov, a notorious antisemite, proposed “round[ing] up all the Yids and send[ing] them to the next world.”^[36] One undated photo shows Duke meeting with Aleksandr Dugin,^[37] a neo-Eurasianist, neo-fascist thinker with deep ties to the European Far Right and author of several books frequently cited by American White nationalists, including The Fourth Political Theory. Duke’s presence helped drum up interest in Russian translations of his work. In 2001, reports began to circulate regarding the sale of his first Russian-language book, The Jewish Question Through the Eyes of an American, which consisted of translated excerpts from his 1998 autobiography, My Awakening. (According to the Los Angeles Times, copies of the book were even advertised and sold “next to the cafeteria in the Duma.”^[38]) By the early 2000s, it became clear that Duke had secured his own Moscow apartment.

Meanwhile, several native Russian groups with White nationalist and White supremacist leanings made their presence known. The Russian journal Atenei, created by three prominent racist Russian thinkers (Pavel Tulaev, Anatoly Ivanov, and Vladimir Avdeyev), sought to advance the cause of preserving racial purity. Avdeyev’s concept of “raciology,” for instance, “biologizes ethnicity” in an effort to explain the distinct development of different cultures while asserting the need for ethnoracial homogeneity.^[39] Here, Russia’s supposed racial purity puts it in a unique position to help hold together a White racial front—a unity of Russia, the United States, and Europe. With this goal in mind, Atenei held a 2006 Moscow conference entitled “The White World’s Future.” Although the manifesto that emerged from the conference focused on European-Russian relations, Atenei invited numerous European and American attendees to participate, including Duke, Guillaume Faye of the French New Right, and the head of the now-banned Slavic Union head Dmitriy Demushkin. Though Atenei has since faded from international relevance, several points from the manifesto were telling. In an effort to facilitate cooperation across borders, it proposed: “[creating] an alternative international council aimed at fighting for the survival of … white nations”; “protecting the rights of fighters for the life and identity of their nations”; and “form[ing] a council of all Indo-European nations.”^[40] To put it another way, what Atenei and the Russian racologists sought was “White pride worldwide.”

Contrary to various articles attributing the Alt Right’s interest in Russia to Dugin’s influence, it was Duke who, in large part, helped bridge the organizing gap between Holocaust deniers and “White nationalism 2.0” in Russia. One author positively compared Duke to John Reed, the Russian revolution’s foremost English-language chronicler.^[41] Duke, and to a lesser extent Carto, demonstrated that Russia, specifically Putin’s Russia, was a worthwhile ally for White nationalists. Above all, what Russia may offer, Duke speculated, was the “key to white survival.”^[42] As Duke observed in a speech at the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow:

What role does Russia and the former Eastern Bloc countries play in this scheme of things? Russia is a White nation! Of the many capital cities of Europe, it is accurate to say that Moscow is the Whitest of them all… . In my opinion, Russia and other Eastern countries have the greatest chance of having racially aware parties achieve political power. If just one nation would break through for our people, I think it would cause a domino effect that would cascade throughout the whole world.^[43]

Duke’s “domino effect” didn’t play out as expected, and by the mid-2010s, a number of far-right leaders—including Alexander Potkin, better known as Alexander Belov, of Russia’s xenophobic Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI)—were facing anti-extremism charges.^[44] Even the once-massive “Russian March”—an annual nationalist extravaganza—became a shadow of its former self. 

Yet the Kremlin’s concern about the possible threat posed by domestic ethno-nationalist groups didn’t dissuade the West’s burgeoning Alt Right from turning to Russia for support and inspiration. In 2008, Preston Wiginton, an American White nationalist with ties to both Russian and British far-right movements and who was reportedly working as DPNI’s Director of International Relations,^[45] spent most of his time pontificating on the importance of Russia to the broader White nationalist movement while touting the benefits of an anti-immigrant Russian identity.^[46] (Although he was believed to have once sublet David Duke’s Moscow apartment,^[47] Wiginton also began staking out his own territory, dubbing Duke an “opportunist” who “will meet with anyone if it makes him look good.”^[48]) Wiginton would later use his contacts and access to Texas A&M, his former alma mater, to host various pro-White nationalist events. Among his guests were Aleksandr Dugin, who spoke to the university by Skype because sanctions prevented him from attending his own event in person,^[49] and Richard Spencer, the White nationalist credited with coining the term “Alt Right.”^[50]

The Alt Right proper was not far behind, although joint organizing with Russian extremists has been haphazard. On the one hand, there is the Alt Right’s interest in Dugin. Arktos, a White nationalist publishing house now based in Hungary, has published a number of Dugin’s works in English, beginning with The Fourth Political Theory in 2012. Another book, the 2014 essay collection Eurasian Mission, outlined Dugin’s approach to working with White nationalists.^[51] Around the same time, Richard Spencer and his innocuously-named think tank, the National Policy Institute (NPI), began churning out translations of Dugin’s work with the help of Spencer’s then-wife, Nina Kouprianova. In 2014, Dugin was even billed as one of the main speakers at NPI’s inaugural “European Congress” in Hungary. The conference, which was organized by Spencer and several other prominent White nationalists from American Renaissance and other outfits, proved to be too racist even for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who prevented Dugin and others from entering the country.^[52] But the following year, in 2015, Taylor, along with White supremacist lawyer Sam Dickson, made his way to Russia for a conference hosted by Russia’s nationalist party, Rodina (“Motherland”).^[53] The event, dubbed the International Russian Conservative Forum, sought to bring together far-right activists from across the globe—what Jared Taylor, the long-time head of American Renaissance, called “an exercise in vigorous free speech that probably could not have been held anywhere else in Europe.”^[54] Around the same time, Rodina, along with the far-right, Orthodox Christian nationalist Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), sought to form an international organization for far-right groups dubbed the World National Conservative Movement (mezhdunarodoe natsional’no-konservativnoe dvizhenie).^[55]

But it was the U.S. 2016 election that solidified the U.S. Alt Right’s appreciation of the Russian Far Right. For many in the movement, Trump’s praise of Putin and his campaign promise to improve U.S.-Russian relations was more than welcome. Matthew Heimbach, former head of the neonazi Traditionalist Worker Party, became a central organizer in the effort to forge transnational, far-right ties between the countries. Although Heimbach was unable to attend the St. Petersburg forum, he traveled to the United States in September 2017 with RIM’s Stanislav Shevchuk, who, as Heimbach told Think Progress, was the group’s Western Europe representative. Their joint tour came just weeks after White nationalists stormed Charlottesville, Virginia—a live reenactment, of sorts, of the Charlottesville marchers’ chant: “Russia is our friend!”^[56]

Russia as a Haven for Anti-LGBTQ Hate?

While Russia may have seemed a promising ally for Holocaust deniers and White nationalists, Russian far-right actors have, thanks to various government crackdowns, found their reach to be limited, forcing them to instead rely on fleeting personal connections. As scholar Marlene Laruelle has argued in researching the issue, “It is important not to conflate influence with confluence.”^[57] That is, while both groups sought to collaborate on certain issues, broader cooperation was hard to achieve. Yet they found common ground in anti-LGBTQ activism, most prominently through the World Congress of Families.

As a project of the U.S.-based International Organization for the Family, which promises to “[unite] and [equip] leaders worldwide to promote the natural family,”^[58] the WCF was founded with the primary mission of defending the traditional family from the destructive forces of modern liberalism. The WCF was born out of the Illinois-based Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society—one of several organizations, including Focus on the Family, that rose to prominence thanks to a wave of institutionalized homophobia within fundamentalist Christianity in the 1970s and ‘80s. But while the WCF’s origins are thoroughly American, it could not exist without Russia.

As WCF co-founder Allan Carlson told ThinkProgress, the organization was created several years after he was “contacted out of the blue” by Anatoly Antonov, a professor at Lomonosov Moscow State University, in the early ‘90s.^[59] Antonov invited Carlson, a former Reagan administration official, to Russia to discuss the importance of the “natural family.”^[60] In 1995, Carlson went, meeting with a variety of scholars, politicians (including members of Russia’s Ministry for Social Protection), and activists.^[61] Some, such as Ivan Shevchenko, head of the Orthodox Brotherhood of Scientists and Specialists, were eager to make their religious affiliations known.^[62]

All shared serious concerns about an impending demographic winter—a term used by “pro-family” groups to refer to the quasi-apocalyptic effects of population decline that, at least in some cases, is akin to White nationalist fears of “White genocide.”^[63] In the West, figures such as Steve Mosher of the WCF-partner organization, the Population Research Institute, have expressed concerns that “anti-family” policies and non-White immigration will lead to the decline of Western civilization.^[64] In Russia, population decline was and continues to be a serious concern, even outside far-right politics,^[65] as poverty, low life expectancy (especially among men), and brain drain have all contributed to a population decline. But rather than address the long-time structural inadequacies behind these statistics, conservative activists have blamed liberalism for destroying the so-called natural family.

The WCF helped cultivate the image of Russia as a valuable partner for American far-right thinkers and organizers across the spectrum. “We are convinced that Russia plays and should play a very prominent role in the matter of family advocacy and moral values on a global scale,” Larry Jacobs, WCF’s now-deceased managing director, said in a 2013 interview.^[66]

Cooperation between Russian and American far-right activists continued and grew. In 2014, a massive leak from Russian hacker group Shaltai Boltai revealed strong connections between Alexey Komov, WCF’s Russian representative, and prominent nationalists such as Aleksandr Dugin and Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev.^[67] Although Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced the WCF to withdraw public sponsorship for what was meant to be a big blowout in Moscow, the meeting nevertheless was set to feature speeches from National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown and leaders of other major right-wing American Christian organizations—although the tumultuous political climate between the United States and Russia may have lowered the turnout.^[68] Leaked data also showed that many American far-right activists, including WCF communications director Donald Feder, received financial backing from sanctioned Russian oligarch Vladimir Yakunin’s Foundation of St. Andrew the First-Called.^[69]

In Russia, WCF proved instrumental in developing some of the country’s most radical anti-LGBTQ laws, including bans on “gay propaganda” (spearheaded by WCF associate Yelena Mizulina) and on the adoption of children by same-sex couples.^[70] Indeed, a 2014 report from Mother Jones observed that “the rise of anti-gay laws in Russia has mirrored, almost perfectly, the rise of WCF’s work in the country, with 13 new anti-gay laws passed since Jacobs first traveled there.”^[71] It did so, in part, by establishing relationships with conservative Orthodox hierarchs, such as Archpriest Dmitri Smirnov of the Russian Orthodox Church’s commission on the family, and nurturing relationships with prominent oligarchs such as Yakunin and Malofeev.^[72] In addition to funding, these ties ensured favorable coverage through networks such as Malofeev’s own Tsargrad TV and the Russian Orthodox Church-aligned channel Spas. While Spas is far from popular, and Tsargrad TV exists only on the web, they’ve delivered WCF’s message to the exact population it has targeted.

From Russia, With Apathy

For the Nazis, Russians were never part of a “White” country, and the same U.S. immigration quotas from the 1920s that White nationalists herald today at the time categorized Russians as racially undesirable.^[73] The country is far from being the “sole White power in the world” that Richard Spencer imagined.

Likewise, contrary to the image of Russia as a haven for the Far Right, Putin has imposed domestic crackdowns on Russian ultra-nationalist activists after far-right, anti-government protesters found common ground with more mainstream opposition protesters.

Yet none of this has had an effect on the Alt Right’s pro-Putin rhetoric. For the Far Right, what matters more is the Kremlin’s general strategy of propping up right-wing and nationalist groups abroad. “Putin is supporting nationalists around the world and building an anti-globalist alliance, while promoting traditional values and self-determination,” Matthew Heimbach told Business Insider in 2016.^[74] That David Duke’s books are currently categorized in Russia as “extremist” literature matters far less than Russia’s image as a traditionalist, racially pure hedge against the West. 

This lack of substance has made the prospect of long-term, meaningful cooperation impossible. “Mutual admiration and shared worldviews are not enough to demonstrate any kind of concrete interactions,” writes Marlene Laruelle, “and still less any kind of Russian influence over U.S. far right public opinion.”^[75] To some extent, the flimsiness of the alliance is baked into the nature of these transnational relationships themselves. Lacking substantive ground on which to connect, the communities that grow out of these relationships tend to be almost endlessly adaptable—and, as a result, devoid of the stability that can encourage a movement to grow. Constant change and infighting ensure that the ties that bind are far from strong. If Putin is the “grand godfather” of “extreme nationalism” as Hillary Clinton once said, he’s a rather estranged relation to its U.S. practitioners.

 Rather than view Far Right mobilization as a sinister Russian plan to undermine U.S. democracy, we ought to see it as just one more instance where Russia has served as an object of obsessive intrigue—the Russophilia that currently tantalizes the U.S. Far Right as a close cousin of the Russophobia that animated more mainstream conservatives a generation before. Just as scholar David S. Foglesong described U.S.-Russia relations in the 19th and 20th Centuries, the country has again become America’s “imaginary twin” and “dark double” today.^[76] What is enthralling about Russia is not the nation itself, but what a Russia imaginary means in relation to the United States or the idea of “White civilization.” Mainstream U.S. politics, as historian and host of the SRB Podcast Sean Guillory observed, “has oscillated between [seeing] Russia as an object of American narcissistic desire to a subject of American neurosis.”^[77] So, too, has the Far Right.

In May 2018, this trend reached a perplexing apex. Lauren Southern—a Canadian far-right YouTuber who often parrots White nationalist talking points—headed to Moscow with noted “Pizzagate expert” Brittany Pettibone for a series of odd, rambling interviews with Dugin. In a brief trailer released that June, Southern and Pettibone danced around an abandoned, graffitied building wearing traditional Russian ushankas with the Red Army logo on them while cracking open bottles of Russian vodka.^[78] In another video, the pair wanders around a sanctioned opposition protest, before offering inane commentary, proudly unfamiliar with prominent opposition leaders, marveling that the protesters carried Russian flags^[79] (something, Southern would later tell me, “Antifa” would never do).^[80]

          “Brittany and I are not experts on Russian politics,” Southern said in an interview soon after their trip, while recounting the impulsive origins of the pair’s project—a Russian fan of Pettibone’s who offered to show them around.^[81] It was as if the pair had undertaken their pilgrimage on a whim, driven to uncover the “real” Russia—a fairy-tale land of fur hats, where “traditionalism” is king and gender norms are respected.^[82] As talking with Southern made clear, it was not Russia that mattered to them so much as the idea of Russia: an imagined embodiment of far-right ideals, the geographic equivalent of what Russian sociologist Yuri Levada once said of Putin—that he was a mirror “in which everyone, communist or democrat, sees what he wants to see and what he hopes for.”^[83]

          For the American Far Right, there is no “real Russia,” but merely a blank canvas upon which the movement’s desires can be drawn. Not a sovereign nation, but a bastion of traditionalism and a haven for those keen on espousing hate; the last cradle of Christian civilization, albeit a Christianity that few among them understand. It is, as the Charlottesville rioters put it, a “friend,” though in reality, more of a politically expedient znakomiy, or acquaintance. The enigmatic “Russian soul” does not exist in its own right. It is whatever they will it to be.